Editorial Observer; The Art and Artifice of Apologizing to China

By STEVEN R. WEISMAN

Published: April 13, 2001

It took two days after the midair collision and emergency landing of an American spy plane on Hainan Island for the Chinese government to seek a formal apology from the United States. Then, after rejecting the demand, the Bush administration took nearly another week to come up with a diplomatic note nuanced enough to be satisfactory to both sides.

What happened in that interval was the rediscovery by President Bush's team of the uses of linguistic ambiguity that have solved diplomatic problems in the past, especially in the Far East, but also led to new problems. For now it appears that the Chinese and the Americans have agreed to see the American apology -- conveyed by Ambassador Joseph Prueher to the Chinese foreign minister -- in their own distinctive ways. It is too early to predict whether their different interpretations will lead to future problems.

The Chinese asked for American apologies over the entire incident, including the practice of flying reconnaissance missions in international airspace. Such a broad apology was rejected by the Bush team. According to Perry Link, a scholar of Chinese language and literature at Princeton, the strongest expressions of regret in the American Embassy's translation of Ambassador Prueher's letter related to the unauthorized entry into Chinese airspace during the emergency landing. Mr. Link said the use of the syllable ''qian'' in that part of the embassy's translation ''does imply that the speaker acknowledges wrongdoing.'' That syllable, however, appears more frequently in the Chinese translation than in the embassy's, he said, enabling a Chinese reader of the Chinese translation to infer that the admission of wrongdoing extends to larger issues.

If there is a familiarity to this exercise, it relates to the Japanese ''apologies'' over World War II that China and others in East Asia have routinely rejected as too weak in accepting responsibility for the war.

When I was based in Tokyo as a correspondent during the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japan issued what it said in English was an expression of ''deep remorse'' for the attack. Some news reports described this as a flat apology. Most Japanese, however, understood that in Japanese it was an expression of ''deep reflection,'' a far milder form of regret used frequently to convey apologies to other Asian countries. The United States did not react formally to the Pearl Harbor statement, but China, South Korea and countries in Southeast Asia continue to express dissatisfaction over such language. In 1995 the Japanese prime minister issued a less ambiguous personal apology for the war, but his attempt to get an equally strong one approved by the Japanese Parliament failed.

It is, of course, easier for the leaders of any country to apologize for past actions than for their current behavior. In the art of apologizing, few have exceeded former President Clinton, who apologized for many actions in history like slavery and the support of right-wing governments in Latin America. He also apologized for some of his own actions and statements on the world stage, including the failure to respond to genocide in Rwanda. (Mr. Clinton's most famous and controversial apologies no doubt related to his personal conduct.)

In Japan, apologies large and small are so embedded in regular discourse that several are repeated during a normal conversation. Mr. Link and other scholars say that the Confucian traditions in China are more connected to confession and self-criticism than apologizing. He said that the habit of magistrates in imperial times of extracting confessions in return for more lenient punishments was picked up and exaggerated by the Communists, especially during the Cultural Revolution that ended in 1976.

Probably too much can be made of Confucian traditions in analyzing the Chinese need for an apology in the plane incident, however. The Chinese demand for an apology for the episode is as understandable in political and human terms as the American refusal to apologize.

''I'm less inclined to see this apology in a cultural sense than as part of something that is in the air all around the world right now,'' said John W. Dower, a historian of Japan and World War II. ''It's the concept of victimization. For the Chinese, this little plane became a metaphor for 150 years of imperialist victimizing of China.''

It may turn out that we will not know the significance of this apology until both sides act in accordance with it. As Mr. Link pointed out, the Chinese may still expect the United States to go from its apology to greater efforts not to repeat the mistake, perhaps by discontinuing reconnaissance missions off the Chinese coast that the Bush administration considers both legal and vital. In that sense, the latest American apology, with all its ambiguities, may close one chapter but open up others for new potential misunderstandings.